Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Choosing a Case
The second HTPC build was far more serious than my initial attempt. I ordered an Omaura TF11 case from Dell back in March, unfortunately there have been tremendous issues with shipping and I've yet to receive the case. The worst part of it all is that Dell continues to list the shipping time as 5 - 7 days on all of the Omaura products, which to my knowledge is still not correct.
The Omaura TF11, which I still don't have
It looks pretty cool at least from the pictures
Omaura is a smaller case manufacturer, but the products are very HT-oriented and thus look great.
My goal was to have the main HTPC housed in a TF11 and then put the drives in TF-HDD cases; each TF-HDD can hold 5 drives, so I'd need two. The beauty of keeping the hard drives out of the main HTPC case is that I can manage thermals a lot better.
Now that's a pretty sweet drive enclosure
With my Omaura order severely delayed I turned to Silverstone, more specifically the Crown CW03. The CW03 features an integrated touchscreen LCD with an 800 x 480 native resolution, but it will allow resolutions of up to 1920 x 1200 to be scaled down to fit on it.
The case itself looks pretty cool but the build quality is horrible, and for a $700 price tag it isn't something I would honestly recommend. There are tons of sharp edges, the screws that ship with the case don't actually properly fit the standoffs that ship with it, the optical drive cover wasn't seated properly from the factory, the drive cage doesn't pull out smoothly and despite what the specs say, only ATX motherboards are supported - there were no holes to screw in the left side of a microATX board.
There are no standoffs under this edge of the microATX 780G board in the CW03 case. Wonderful.
The latter is a problem for me since I'm actually going to be using a microATX board, the only reason I want a large case is so I can go with a full sized heatsink/fan for the CPU to keep it silent. I've got a 35U rack going into the theater so I have more than enough vertical space for it.
This is harder than it looks thanks to a not-very-well built case.
Since I had the CW03 around I figured I'd try building the HTPC in it and see how well it would work.
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JarredWalton - Friday, May 2, 2008 - link
Or rather than ripping at full bitrate, you could reencode to something smaller, so you can get 5-10GB per movie and still have a good quality 1080P output. AutoMKV is the new tool for stuff like that.legoman666 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I rip all of my movies to h264 + ac3 in a mkv container. Just because you illegally download movies in mkv format does not mean that everyone else does also.kevon27 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I only do bluray... DVD's are for the peasants. I not going to subject myself to that low quality bit torrent stuff you commoners are use to.Pip-pip!
Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
You know, you can rip bluray, bluray rips are also available online.... In fact I think anand specificall discussed ripping "high deffinition content" in mkv format... what do you think he means?Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Ok, so how does that iPhone web interface work? I was thinking of developing somethign for PPC that would allow roughly the same kind of access, but I guess if there's stuff in the works I'll just check that out.crimson117 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
It's just a web interface that happens to work in the iPhone browser. You could also access it from a laptop or desktop on your network.I'd love to see a developer come up with a native iPhone app for controlling media setups, though I expect there'd need to be some special software running on your media pc.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Exactly, the options are two-fold:1) Develop an iPhone optimized website (ala digg.com/iphone or iphone.facebook.com), or
2) Create an iPhone application that triggers web services running on the HTPC itself.
With the SDK due out this summer, I'm hoping the latter will be a possibility.
Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Perhaps I'll see what can be done on PPC and put it out there then so non-GSM/apple folks can enjoy that kind of fun ;)cghebert - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Anand,sweet setup! Will you guys be doing any of your HTPC stuff with windows xp for those of us who haven't yet "upgraded" to Vista?
allengambrell - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Check out myTV plugin for media center for managing your tv shows. It works much better the video brower or mymovies because it uses a full database and downloads all the episode and show information from the web. I use it to manage all my recorded and downloaded shows.Also are you going to install a ATSC tuner? This is one of the best things about media center. I have dish too but the offair recoreded shows look much better on media center than on dish.
If I were you I would move the storage for the dvds and media to a fileserver dedicated for this purpose. You can then not have to worry so much about noise because you can hide it away from the rest of the rack. I run a gigabit network and have no problem playing recored HD shows or ripped dvds on 3 differant computers at a time. The only storage I have in my media center pcs is for recording show off the offair antenna. This is only because some nights I am recording up to 3 hd shows at a time and I am afraid that that and the playback may be a little to much for the network to handle.
Also myMovies and myTV both work great in a client/server setup you can put the database servers on the media server and then any changes you make on one computer will be reflected on all.
I have also tested a htpc with the same chipset that you are using and to me it seems to be really slow compared to my other intel/nvidia based htpc. It even has some trouble decoding recoreded hd shows fast enough to not to get skips and audio sync issues. I would stay away from it.